Artist Jim Lee and writer Scott Snyder — two of the comics industry’s most popular talents — are launching a new Superman title in 2013.

The comic’s title has yet to be finalized, but the new series was announced during the DC Entertainment Superman panel at New York Comic Con. The announcement comes on the heels of Snyder’s “Batman” No. 13 release — the first book in the much-hyped, Joker-centric “Death of the Family” story line.

“It’s very strange to commute from Gotham to Metropolis,” Snyder said Wednesday. “One is very dark, and one is very bright, and the characters are incredibly different from one another.”

Despite those differences, Snyder spoke of drawing inspiration from the kinship between Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent.

“The friendship and the relationship between those characters is something I’ve always loved,” Snyder said. “Writing Bruce, when he’s thinking about calling for help, or he’s thinking about how down he is, there’s almost an impulse to write Superman into the book. Or similarly here writing Clark, there’s sort of an impulse where you think, ‘He would go to Bruce and ask him this.’ So as different as they are, they are, I think, two of the closest friends in the DC [universe], and in comics. Their friendship is something that’s endlessly rich and fascinating to me. And to get to write them both separately is something that is just the greatest thrill of my life professionally.”

Snyder said that the new title wasn’t handed down to him, but rather an idea he pitched to DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio after it had been percolating for some time.

“I told him that I’ve had this Superman story in mind for a while, and it’s a big, kind of epic-sized story, like ‘Court of Owls,'” Snyder said. “It was sort of like, this is everything I could possibly imagine wanting to explore about the character in one story if I only ever got one story: to pit him against a threat that I couldn’t be more excited about, to get into aspects of his character that have fascinated me since I was a kid. So what I pitched to Dan is this big, singular, epic story that will pit Superman against challenges. It will really rock him and Metropolis to the core, and at the same time be a pretty intimate exploration of the character and all of the things that I love about the character.”

Snyder wouldn’t go into details about his iteration of the Last Son of Krypton, but said he would approach the character similarly to his work on “Batman.”

“The way I try and do these characters is always to figure out what I think is most exciting to me about them, or what I’m most interested in at that moment about their heroism,” Snyder said. “With Batman and the Court of Owls, it was this crushing sense of responsibility of knowing a city better than anyone else in the world, and yet how impossible that task is. And here with Superman, it’s similar, and I tried to approach him and say, ‘Well, what makes Superman the greatest hero in my mind? What is his greatest and most heroic characteristic that I love the most?’ And then try and create a story that both explores that and celebrates it, but also challenges it, and comes at him in a way where his greatest strength might be his greatest weakness as well. It might be the thing that brings him down.”

The comic marks the first time Snyder and DC Entertainment Co-Publisher Lee — who just completed a run on “Justice League” with writer Geoff Johns — have joined forces creatively.

“To say it’s a dream come true sounds like a phrase you hear a lot, but it couldn’t be more true,” Snyder said. “Jim Lee is one of my childhood idol artists…. So to get to work with Jim on one of the most, if not the most iconic character in the world at this particular time in history is like a dream job times a hundred.”

2013 will be a momentous year for Superman, who’s also getting a big-screen makeover in Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel,” due out June 14, 2013.